I had the same experience. I really tried to use Kagi as my main search engine but it just was not good enough for me. I did like the feature where you can exclude domains from the results. It couild work nice as some kind of addon to Google search results.

I will give it another try in the future and hope my experience is different. I do like the company and the vision behind it.

Google either finds my results or hides it with SEO spam. Kagi either finds it or doesn't.

In either case I need to re-search, but at least I didn't contribute to adtech and have some control over the results.

what does !g do?

It lets you search the current query on Google. It's also a bang on ddg

Honestly wondering why you'd send the query through Kagi if it is only going to ping ddg/google anyway? Does Kagi do some filtering on the responses?

Maybe I phrased that badly. You would have set kagi as your default search engine, but sometimes you want to search something on a specific site only. With bangs, kagi will redirect you to another search engine instead of running the query itself. If you append !w to your query, you will search on Wikipedia instead. If you append !g, your query is redirected to Google. There is no advantage over searching on Google directly, but it is much faster than going to the Google page if kagi is your default. And I meant that the !g bang works on ddg as well, though there probably is a ddg bang on kagi too.

Also it skips the dumb ads when you search via Kagi.

maybe it's the industry I'm in or the languages I use, but my experience has been the opposite. Being able to filter out all the SEO gamed crap at the top of the results has been great for me and the results are at least on-par with Google.